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Home Issues Backissues Volume 31, No.1 To Lose Is to Win: The Candidate-Placement Strategy of Minor Parties under Japan's Mixed-Member Majoritarian System

To Lose Is to Win: The Candidate-Placement Strategy of Minor Parties under Japan's Mixed-Member Majoritarian System

Jih-Wen Lin
2008 / 11
Volume 15, No.2

pp.37-66
10.6612/tjes.2008.15.02.37-66
Paper

Abstract

Our intuition suggests that a mixed-member majoritarian system is unfavorable to minor parties, a situation caused by strategic voting in the single-member district races. This article argues that, exactly because of strategy voting, minor parties can participate in the single-member district competitions in exchange for the vote cast by the strategic voters in the race of the proportional representation (PR) tier. Even so, minor parties should be selective of the single-member district races to place their candidate, because strategic voting in some constituencies has been weakened by forces like clientelism. To identify the single-member districts where minor parties are most likely to place a candidate, this paper studies Japan's four House of Representatives elections held under the mixed-member majoritarian system. The major finding is that, at the district level, the number of candidates increases with the tendency of strategic voting, the degree of urbanization, and the average district magnitude of PR competition; it is negatively associated with the existence of second-generation candidates and the seniority of the winner. These results confirm the hypothesis about the candidate-placement strategy of minor parties, and explain why minor parties do not nominate candidates indiscriminately as some contamination effects theories expect. Since Japan's PR seats are elected in 11 blocks, minor parties can easily spot the areas where they can attract the compensatory votes. That is why minor parties in Taiwan, which used the same electoral system for the recent legislative election but had all PR seats allocated on a nationwide list, did not follow the Japanese strategy to boost their PR votes.

Keywords

mixed-member majoritarian system

minor party

nomination strategy

Japan's House of Representatives election

Duverger's Law

contamination effects theory